COTS-Architecture with a Real-Time OS for a Self-Driving Miniature Vehicle

The international competition 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge significantly fostered the research and development on intelligent vehicles. Recent prototypes from Google for instance are able to drive fully autonomously through the San Francisco bay area for more than 450,000km. Even if self-driving vehicles are not yet available for purchase for customers, technology spin-offs are increasingly finding their ways into today's vehicles as pedestrian collision warning system, automated parking, or adaptive cruise control with temporary lane following. Thus, the upcoming generation of software and computer engineers needs to be accordingly educated to be already familiar with the concepts and pitfalls of these complex systems. In this article, we describe the architecture of a self-driving miniature vehicle based solely on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components for the hardware and the real-time operating system ChibiOS/RT for the software/hardware interface